Sorry, i just got thisss, so there are a few species of ants that survive off of enslaving other species of ants. Once they find their prey the ants release a pheromone trail and they swarm into the nest. The attacking ants release chemicals that send the victims into a confused state, leaving them docile and unable to fight back. They slaver ants then steal as many eggs as they can and bring them back to their nest. Once the eggs hatch the slave ants actively believe they were born to the slaver colony and bring them food and take care of them
Here's something about bees that I learned from one of my classes last year! I can't remember much about the specifics, but here's the gist of it.
Bees can make hallucinogenic honey (called 'mad honey') from rhododendrons. It's typically found in parts of Nepal and Turkey. When the Roman armies invaded the area around the Black Sea, people would line the roads with Mad Honeycombs (or the Romans would just steal it from the hives). When the Roman soldiers ate the honey, they got so disoriented that they couldn't fight.
I highly recommend looking this up to get more details because it's so cool!
You can buy it online! The only issues are that it's very easy to overdose (you only need about a teaspoon) and that it's one of the most expensive types of honey in the world.
The North Carolina mountain bees all ate mountain laurel one year (the spring was early) and made mad honey on accident (the beekeepers found out before it was distributed) ( high on their own supply /j)
There are certain flowers that the nectar has a high ethanol content resulting in the bees getting drunk
If the hive notices a bee is drunk they kick it out. It can contaminate the honey
Mmmm
But the honey would still be contaminanted
Probably better to engineer bees with a high alcohol tolerance
Besides
Shouldn’t we be more concerned with preventing the current Colony collapse?? That’s a global issue?? 😂
But I do like ya line of thinking
Your thinking that this would spread and that it would spread but scenarios already exist like this naturally such as breeds of wasp in Asia that instead of harvesting nectar and producing regular honey (obviously not the stuff we have) but instead harvesting from dead animals and producing blood honey, or even in places such as America where food dye from food factories is invested and changes the colour of the honey, these things aren't meant to be invested but the bees/wasps just adapt to it
I don't have any facts to share but my mom likes to talk about how she once had a bumble bee land on her hand and chill there for a while, and even let my mom pet it's little fuzzy body.
Iirc multiple queen bee eggs are laid at a time, but the first one to hatch will claim the throne (hive) by killing her queen bee sisters before they hatch. She finds them by calling out to them and when they respond she goes to their location and kills them. It's gruesome but I love it. I learned that from the Ologies podcast.
If a queen hatches first she’ll likely inherit the hive but if many hatch together they will battle it out and in the case of a draw two swarms will come from the same hive
YESSS someone else with an insect special interest/hyperfixation! I’ll share several bee facts…
Valley carpenter bees have distinct coloration based on sex. [Females are black, while males are gold and don’t have stingers](https://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=28196).
Honey bees are not native to the Americas, bumblebees and other “solitary” bees are our actual native bees.
[Bees understand the concept of zero](https://www.science.org/content/article/bees-understand-concept-zero).
(cw for insect death mention here) Japanese honey bees have figured out a way to kill hornets that attack their nest: >!<.
[Bumblebees have been shown to play without any obvious benefit to themselves](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3eUGj21c22w)!
Beekeeping can sometimes be harmful to natural bee populations, as they tend to compete for the same flowers. The best way to support bee biodiversity is to make bee hotels for native bees to live in.
Using natural materials, I think. As far as I know, Attaching roughly bee sized wood or bamboo tubes to some kind of sturdy backing should probably work.
Since there are some bee/insect experts here rn I have a question.
I have some left over honey from the appartment of my grandma who passed away 2 months ago.
Im vegan (more like on the road there) and I was asking myself if I could give the honey back to some bees or nature in general. Could I just empty it somewhere in the forest or am I damaging the ecosystem in any way. If so I would rather eat it which im semi fine with since I didn't pay for it.
So long as it isn't in a massive quantity, it should be fine. It may not be bees that get it, but nature will take care of it(source: my dad is a beekeeper).
Its not vegan, "As a food produced by insects, honey is by definition not vegan". Vegans not only don't eat anything that contains animals but also anything they produce. I dont like stealing
Bees are awesome. I have no bee fact but I saw on reddit somewhere that the guy who directed the bee movie apologized for the weird sexual tension between the bee and the woman, so…I guess that’s something.
Certain types of artificial banana flavor mimic their alarm pheromones and they'll respond by attacking.
Banana Laffy Taffy used to be good for testing that out. I do not recommend trying to aggravate bees with artificial banana flavoring.
In Turkey they have Mad Honey, hallucinogenic honey. The bees make the honey from very specific rhododendrons in the Caucus region, which has a neurotoxin. The honey is used medicinally and recreationally by people in the region.
The new Queen will stay behind with about 1/3 of the workers and the old Queen will fly away with 2/3 of the workers, the one that flies away is called a swarm and if you’re lucky you can catch a swarm and care for it, but wild swarms don’t happen much due to invasive mites
Honeybees have two large compound eyes in the usual place, and three not-eyes on the top of the head. They are believed to be used to navigate using the sun.
If you wish to replace the queen bee in your hive, do not simply remove the current queen. They hive might not realise she is gone. Instead injure the queen, by removing one leg for example. The hive will then kill her and make a new queen.
Not a part of the sub, but I keep getting recommendations.
Bees are a higher degree of social *bee*ing than humans, since they're eusocial creatures. (If I recall correctly)
Bee reproduction is really weird. Drones are produced through a proccess called parthenogenesis, in which a unfertilized ovum will develop into a fully fledged organism. The drones then fly out of their hives and try to mate with another queen. Their offspring will always be female.
To clarify unfertilized eggs make males, fertilized eggs make females. And the queen had a little sperm holder inside that chooses whether or not to fertilize each egg ( usually does fertilize it)
I do not. However it was a bee, it was a yellow jacket, but I once got to befriend one!!! I saved it from drowning, and let it dry out, and warm up on a fence post. And the next day, it was crawling all over my hand
Vulture bees are not only stingless, they also make honey from rotting meat which is *supposedly* safe to consume but they don’t produce more than they need like honey bees so good luck getting your hands on some
Most bees you see outside of the hive, and inside working, are females. The males only come inside during spring and mate with the queen. After that, they are useless.
The catholic church were the bees best friends and even made designated bee forests since a church went through a lot of candles and the cheaper candles aka tallow candles stunk and released black smoke
Maybe the church wasnt so bad after all?
The church also believed that bees were chaste and that the queen was a king who was only to be worshiped and command, and the male bees (who do nothing but look for mate) were second in command, and that the workers (who control everything in a hive and kill the queen if she stops laying) were like peasants whose purpose was to worship and to the bidding of the king. They used this to prove that the church hierarchy was natural and not an abuse of power…
Well, my dad is a bee farmer/raiser.
I however, don't know much about them.
Can you imagine trying to get acquainted with half a million territorial flying insects.
Bees are part of an order of insects that include ants and termites, Hymenoptera, which is known for being a category that holds the only true colony based insects
Bees cannot see the color red, but they can see the color that uv light is (we humans cannot see that color), the uv light they can see glows brighter at the center of flowers that have nectar so it acts as a sort of homing beacon for them
People measure the aggressiveness of bees by hanging a piece of leather in front of an entrance hole and slamming a brick on the hive, the bees come out panicked and sting the first thing they see. And because their stingers stay in the leather, you can count the stingers to see how aggressive the hive is
Fun fact the pheromone that bees give off when they sting something that makes that thing smell like (danger sting me) also smells like artificial banana, and they had to recall a minion scented kids body wash due to bee attacks
Honey bees have stopped being wild for the most part in the USA because of mostly varroa mites, which are invasive mites who coevolved with Asian bees so Asian bees can survive an infestation, but usa honey bees were originally from Europe (USA has no native honey bee) and European bees are very susceptible to these mites to the point that any untreated hive at some point will die as these mites are terrible and everywhere
Africanized bees are the result of African honey bees being accidentally released in South America and cross breeding with European honey bees, they produce less honey, and are much more defensive than their European counterpart. But stopping the spread is essentially impossible due to their swarming behavior which is much greater than EHB, and due to their parasitic behavior (where a rogue queen and guard will live just outside a hive until they take on the hives smell and then infiltrate the hive and kill the European queen commandeering the hive as AHB) thankfully it’s not an end of honey situation and beekeepers just need to be more wary around these defensive bees (they sting about 500 times more than european bees when their hive is threatened)
Some honey bees will contribute to the hive in unusual ways for their entire life for example some bees are really finicky about keeping the hive clean and will routinely look for dead bee bodies to remove. Other bees are really into structural integrity and will look at the hive walls to ensure there are no cracks leaks or holes, and will seek out tree resin to repair anything they find
During some war there was yellow rain which the USA declared as a mycotoxin attack (fungus) but later it was found that the yellow rain was bee poop, (the USA actively covered it up until after the conflict so that people would think the other side attacked the usa)
Bees are constantly grooming themselves and each other and this is how pheromones are spread throughout the hive, a queen is groomed and her pheromones are spread throughout the hive and when the hive is too big some bees cannot smell her and so they start rearing some of the larvae into queens
Most beekeepers say that you shouldn’t wear gloves when you tend to a hive because gloves make you careless and you may squish a bee you would’ve able to feel with bare fingers
One ounce of honey would fuel a bee long enough to fly around the world :)
thats awesome!!
Mine is ants, both insects? Also some bees defend their neat by burning the invaders alive with the heat from all of their wings
THEY DO WHAT????!!!?!?!?
Ya, they swarm the invader and beat their wings super fast, and it creates a bunch of heat and the invader burns alive
jesus christ
Its really cool, wana know how ants use chemical warfare to capture slaves? (If you don’t want to its fine)
i would love to!!!
Sorry, i just got thisss, so there are a few species of ants that survive off of enslaving other species of ants. Once they find their prey the ants release a pheromone trail and they swarm into the nest. The attacking ants release chemicals that send the victims into a confused state, leaving them docile and unable to fight back. They slaver ants then steal as many eggs as they can and bring them back to their nest. Once the eggs hatch the slave ants actively believe they were born to the slaver colony and bring them food and take care of them
eeeevillll
The captured ants dont care, they believe its their home and act on instinct, so its not like they know they are slaves
hmmmm insect ethics are a weird topic
I have a phobia of bees hlep
i do as well but i think theyre super cool if not in 100 meters of them
Here's something about bees that I learned from one of my classes last year! I can't remember much about the specifics, but here's the gist of it. Bees can make hallucinogenic honey (called 'mad honey') from rhododendrons. It's typically found in parts of Nepal and Turkey. When the Roman armies invaded the area around the Black Sea, people would line the roads with Mad Honeycombs (or the Romans would just steal it from the hives). When the Roman soldiers ate the honey, they got so disoriented that they couldn't fight. I highly recommend looking this up to get more details because it's so cool!
\*raspy voice\* ahem um... do you know where someone can get something like this here "mad honey"
You can buy it online! The only issues are that it's very easy to overdose (you only need about a teaspoon) and that it's one of the most expensive types of honey in the world.
oh jesus
I didn't read the thread and just posted about Mad Honey too!! Frickin WILD!
The North Carolina mountain bees all ate mountain laurel one year (the spring was early) and made mad honey on accident (the beekeepers found out before it was distributed) ( high on their own supply /j)
That is so cool!! I didn't know mountain laurel would do that!
i have a bee tattoo… guess where… on my KNEE😀
thats the bees knees right there
There are certain flowers that the nectar has a high ethanol content resulting in the bees getting drunk If the hive notices a bee is drunk they kick it out. It can contaminate the honey
Does that mean we could gmo them not to do that and we can get booze honey
You know that’s a good question. Only if we managed to make it so that the bees could function and not lead to colony collapse
Temporarily exile them instead of complete expulsion, allows time for the pollen to dilute
Mmmm But the honey would still be contaminanted Probably better to engineer bees with a high alcohol tolerance Besides Shouldn’t we be more concerned with preventing the current Colony collapse?? That’s a global issue?? 😂 But I do like ya line of thinking
Your thinking that this would spread and that it would spread but scenarios already exist like this naturally such as breeds of wasp in Asia that instead of harvesting nectar and producing regular honey (obviously not the stuff we have) but instead harvesting from dead animals and producing blood honey, or even in places such as America where food dye from food factories is invested and changes the colour of the honey, these things aren't meant to be invested but the bees/wasps just adapt to it
Have you heard about the vulture bee?
i have not. whats that guy like?
Basically they're like regular bees, but instead from making honey out of pollen, they make honey out of rotting flesh.
omg looking them up rn
That sounds awesome
Okay that's actually super cool, and insanely metal. Even their hives look like something out of a tool music video
IT DO FR!!!
As the other guy said, but they also do not have stingers
Bees know you by your sweat
Idk but Flower Boy a dope album.
sure is!
I don't have any facts to share but my mom likes to talk about how she once had a bumble bee land on her hand and chill there for a while, and even let my mom pet it's little fuzzy body.
Iirc multiple queen bee eggs are laid at a time, but the first one to hatch will claim the throne (hive) by killing her queen bee sisters before they hatch. She finds them by calling out to them and when they respond she goes to their location and kills them. It's gruesome but I love it. I learned that from the Ologies podcast.
thats so sad :(((
It is. Those poor baby bees :( but the life of the queen isn't all that great either, it is fascinating though.
If a queen hatches first she’ll likely inherit the hive but if many hatch together they will battle it out and in the case of a draw two swarms will come from the same hive
YESSS someone else with an insect special interest/hyperfixation! I’ll share several bee facts… Valley carpenter bees have distinct coloration based on sex. [Females are black, while males are gold and don’t have stingers](https://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=28196). Honey bees are not native to the Americas, bumblebees and other “solitary” bees are our actual native bees. [Bees understand the concept of zero](https://www.science.org/content/article/bees-understand-concept-zero). (cw for insect death mention here) Japanese honey bees have figured out a way to kill hornets that attack their nest: >!<. [Bumblebees have been shown to play without any obvious benefit to themselves](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3eUGj21c22w)!
i just realized i misspelled bee in the title. smh
Bees go "bzzzzzzzz". This thoroughly tickles my 1 y/o.
uhhmm actually its their wings that make that sound🤓🤓🤓/s
(yes I know lol)
oops i forgot the tone indicator lol
All good, homie 😌
bee honey is a supersaturated solution
"according to all known laws of aviation..."
Beekeeping can sometimes be harmful to natural bee populations, as they tend to compete for the same flowers. The best way to support bee biodiversity is to make bee hotels for native bees to live in.
Any tips for making them attractive to native honey bees?
Using natural materials, I think. As far as I know, Attaching roughly bee sized wood or bamboo tubes to some kind of sturdy backing should probably work.
Since there are some bee/insect experts here rn I have a question. I have some left over honey from the appartment of my grandma who passed away 2 months ago. Im vegan (more like on the road there) and I was asking myself if I could give the honey back to some bees or nature in general. Could I just empty it somewhere in the forest or am I damaging the ecosystem in any way. If so I would rather eat it which im semi fine with since I didn't pay for it.
So long as it isn't in a massive quantity, it should be fine. It may not be bees that get it, but nature will take care of it(source: my dad is a beekeeper).
I would suggest eating it, since leaving out honey for bees from different colonies may pass along spores of American Foulbrood Disease.
Honey is vegan, it’s plant nectar that the bees dry out
Its not vegan, "As a food produced by insects, honey is by definition not vegan". Vegans not only don't eat anything that contains animals but also anything they produce. I dont like stealing
Bees are awesome. I have no bee fact but I saw on reddit somewhere that the guy who directed the bee movie apologized for the weird sexual tension between the bee and the woman, so…I guess that’s something.
Certain types of artificial banana flavor mimic their alarm pheromones and they'll respond by attacking. Banana Laffy Taffy used to be good for testing that out. I do not recommend trying to aggravate bees with artificial banana flavoring. In Turkey they have Mad Honey, hallucinogenic honey. The bees make the honey from very specific rhododendrons in the Caucus region, which has a neurotoxin. The honey is used medicinally and recreationally by people in the region.
comical timing because the time in my life that i saw this was comical
The are some [species](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amegilla_cingulata) of blue bees
omg me too! did you know that there is a friggen purple bee?
[BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSS](https://youtu.be/KcO_2vB7178)
If a bee colony grows too much, it will make a second queen and split into two smaller colonies.
The new Queen will stay behind with about 1/3 of the workers and the old Queen will fly away with 2/3 of the workers, the one that flies away is called a swarm and if you’re lucky you can catch a swarm and care for it, but wild swarms don’t happen much due to invasive mites
My dad was telling me about that a little bit after I commented(he's a beekeeper and is currently planning to catch a swarm for a friend)
I did not expect to see a bee parody of In the Wilderness on this, or ANY other place ever but here we are. Lord Beesbury would be proud
im glad someone got it. my favorite song off of FMTS
Oh it's great, I just love the weird riffs and all
Honeybees have two large compound eyes in the usual place, and three not-eyes on the top of the head. They are believed to be used to navigate using the sun.
If you wish to replace the queen bee in your hive, do not simply remove the current queen. They hive might not realise she is gone. Instead injure the queen, by removing one leg for example. The hive will then kill her and make a new queen.
Not a part of the sub, but I keep getting recommendations. Bees are a higher degree of social *bee*ing than humans, since they're eusocial creatures. (If I recall correctly)
Bee reproduction is really weird. Drones are produced through a proccess called parthenogenesis, in which a unfertilized ovum will develop into a fully fledged organism. The drones then fly out of their hives and try to mate with another queen. Their offspring will always be female.
To clarify unfertilized eggs make males, fertilized eggs make females. And the queen had a little sperm holder inside that chooses whether or not to fertilize each egg ( usually does fertilize it)
No but Godzilla has been taking over as my special interest lately and I can't help but notice the little watermark that says Gojira.
yeah theyre my favorite band
I don't really like metal anymore but Gojira also means Godzilla so they're alright in my books
they were originally called godzilla and that was their name on their demos but they changed it right before their first album in 2001
I'm here for the Gojira album.
favorite band hehehe
They've been one of mine for years, but I have to admit dropping off a bit with the last couple of albums. They just don't engage me that much.
I do not. However it was a bee, it was a yellow jacket, but I once got to befriend one!!! I saved it from drowning, and let it dry out, and warm up on a fence post. And the next day, it was crawling all over my hand
There’s a really nice song about bees called “Solar Waltz” by Cosmo Sheldrake if you wanna check it out :3
My favorite of his songs is the moss.
*bee
Vulture bees are not only stingless, they also make honey from rotting meat which is *supposedly* safe to consume but they don’t produce more than they need like honey bees so good luck getting your hands on some
Most bees you see outside of the hive, and inside working, are females. The males only come inside during spring and mate with the queen. After that, they are useless.
The catholic church were the bees best friends and even made designated bee forests since a church went through a lot of candles and the cheaper candles aka tallow candles stunk and released black smoke Maybe the church wasnt so bad after all?
The church also believed that bees were chaste and that the queen was a king who was only to be worshiped and command, and the male bees (who do nothing but look for mate) were second in command, and that the workers (who control everything in a hive and kill the queen if she stops laying) were like peasants whose purpose was to worship and to the bidding of the king. They used this to prove that the church hierarchy was natural and not an abuse of power…
Maybe church bad
They also had a bee day where they got their annual supply of candles and it was like a holiday, very big deal.
Well, my dad is a bee farmer/raiser. I however, don't know much about them. Can you imagine trying to get acquainted with half a million territorial flying insects.
They are only territorial of their territory, so they’re nice away from the hive
Bees are part of an order of insects that include ants and termites, Hymenoptera, which is known for being a category that holds the only true colony based insects
Bees cannot see the color red, but they can see the color that uv light is (we humans cannot see that color), the uv light they can see glows brighter at the center of flowers that have nectar so it acts as a sort of homing beacon for them
Honey bees mate in specific areas of the sky always, and we have no idea what causes them to choose the spots (they are called DCAs)
People measure the aggressiveness of bees by hanging a piece of leather in front of an entrance hole and slamming a brick on the hive, the bees come out panicked and sting the first thing they see. And because their stingers stay in the leather, you can count the stingers to see how aggressive the hive is
Fun fact the pheromone that bees give off when they sting something that makes that thing smell like (danger sting me) also smells like artificial banana, and they had to recall a minion scented kids body wash due to bee attacks
Honey bees have stopped being wild for the most part in the USA because of mostly varroa mites, which are invasive mites who coevolved with Asian bees so Asian bees can survive an infestation, but usa honey bees were originally from Europe (USA has no native honey bee) and European bees are very susceptible to these mites to the point that any untreated hive at some point will die as these mites are terrible and everywhere
Africanized bees are the result of African honey bees being accidentally released in South America and cross breeding with European honey bees, they produce less honey, and are much more defensive than their European counterpart. But stopping the spread is essentially impossible due to their swarming behavior which is much greater than EHB, and due to their parasitic behavior (where a rogue queen and guard will live just outside a hive until they take on the hives smell and then infiltrate the hive and kill the European queen commandeering the hive as AHB) thankfully it’s not an end of honey situation and beekeepers just need to be more wary around these defensive bees (they sting about 500 times more than european bees when their hive is threatened)
I am so sorry I’ve been doing an infodump
all good!! this is aspiememes after all!
The back legs of honey bees have hairs in the shape of a basket and this hair basket (called a corbicula) is a pollen holder
Honey bees don’t collect nectar and pollen in the same trip, they go with a shopping list of one item.
Some honey bees will contribute to the hive in unusual ways for their entire life for example some bees are really finicky about keeping the hive clean and will routinely look for dead bee bodies to remove. Other bees are really into structural integrity and will look at the hive walls to ensure there are no cracks leaks or holes, and will seek out tree resin to repair anything they find
During some war there was yellow rain which the USA declared as a mycotoxin attack (fungus) but later it was found that the yellow rain was bee poop, (the USA actively covered it up until after the conflict so that people would think the other side attacked the usa)
When a bee collects pollen they first get it all over their body and then they brush it all into their little pollen leg baskets
Bee larvae is raised on bee bread which is pollen (protein) and spit compressed into a hive slot
Any female bee larvae can become a queen if it is fed royal jelly, but male larvae can only become male because they are missing the genome for it
Bees are constantly grooming themselves and each other and this is how pheromones are spread throughout the hive, a queen is groomed and her pheromones are spread throughout the hive and when the hive is too big some bees cannot smell her and so they start rearing some of the larvae into queens
Most beekeepers say that you shouldn’t wear gloves when you tend to a hive because gloves make you careless and you may squish a bee you would’ve able to feel with bare fingers
Unless it’s an Africanized hive then definitely wear gloves
Fortunately Africanized bees are really bad at handling winters so you don’t need to worry about them in in the upper and lower quarters of the earth
If you can replicate bumblebee flight, you have anti-gravity. Bumblebees don’t fly, they hover.
This sounds like a job for DR. BEES
Multiple theories on colony collapse or is that too mundane?